Climate Change Science at RWU

Although Roger Williams U is a small, liberal arts school, we have an active research program that produces some amazing science. The most recent example of this, I am proud to share, is the result of a friend of mine's work on climate change in the Antarctic. Dr. Scott Rutherford is one of the co-authors of the cover story in the Jan 22 issue of Nature (abstract here). Essentially, the work shows that "significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 °C per decade over the past 50 years..." As could be expected, especially given the high-profile publication, this new work has made something of a splash and is already under attack by the climate change skeptic, Steve McIntyre.

So, congrats to Scott (and the other authors), even if it's bad news for the rest of us, and good luck dealing with the climate change skeptics - this has the possibility to become a remaking of the other Climate Change hullabaloo we had on campus a few semesters ago. Hopefully, the new PResident will work quickly to "restore Science to its rightful place".

Quick hits

The platypus genome put me in the mood for more evolutionary biology, so here are some interesting recent papers of an evolutionary bend (note: Abstracts available, but subscription or "pay-per-view" needed for full article access. Sorry.):

Amino acid sequence data from collagen extracted from the bones of Tyrannasaurus rex and the mammoth, Mammut americanum, were used to build a phylogeny of these two species. As expected, based on previous phylogenetic work, M. americanum groups with modern elephants and T. rex groups with modern birds (chickens to be exact). This paper builds on earlier success in using protein sequences to elucidate evolutionary history of extinct organisms.

Hermaphoditism evolves when mate-search efficiency is poor. In other words, if ... you ... move ... really ... slowly ... and ... don't come across another individual of your species all that often, it's best to be prepared when you do - it would really suck to look all that time for a mate only to come across an individual of the same sex and have to start the search all over again.

Analysis of oxygen isotope levels in the tooth enamel of extinct relatives of elephants suggest that modern probocidians evolved from aquatic or semi-aquatic forms. This is expected given the close phylogentic relationship between extant elephants and the sirenians (manatees and dugongs) and provides new arguments for the idea that elephant trunks may have originally evolved as a snorkel.